The Needle’s Eye has been on my list of possible choices for RFB for several years, because I wanted to have someone to talk to about it. I have read at it off and on over the years. I started over a couple of days ago; I finished reading it today. The label the publisher gave it is essay/poetry. I can go along with that since it is a hybrid of the two. The “essay” parts are poetic, while the poems often provide examples/commentary on the “essay” parts. I would say it is one long poem made up of essayistic sections and verse. All of it connected in an associative melding of tropes and imagistic repetition.
. Howe uses the two boys in the Boston marathon bombings, Sts.Francis and Clare, various film makers, and her own life to talk about the creation of reality through memory, story (fairy tales), history, legend, and personal narrative. I will read it again (it is short 120 pages) before RFB meets in August. I can see reading it again years from now. She ends the book with a quote from St. Francis—What we are looking for is what is looking.
Here are some other quotes from the book: “We keep adapting to whatever we ourselves invented.”
“I think black-and-white film is closer to personal memory than it is to our dreams.”
“Suffering is actually jewel, precious and personal. Some might even say that it holds up the heavens with its radiance.”
“To the human brain, a hallucination is the exact same thing as seeing the world just as it is.”
subtext 